Wednesday, July 28, 2010

National research output is for the use of the nation irrespective of cast, creed and location of the end user. With this objective, some of the countries have already started giving open access to their Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) over the Internet for the use of academic community around the globe. ETDs help in minimizing duplication of research work, minimizing plagiarism, giving visibility and world-wide access to the research work.

INFLIBNET is on Role:

In India, the UGC, through its notification (Minimum Standards & Procedure for Award of M.Phil./ Ph.D Degree, Regulation, 2009 of dated 1st June 2009), has entrusted INFLIBNET Centre the task of implementing and executing Indian ETDs on public domain with state-of-the-art technologies. This notification is for submission of electronic version of theses and dissertations to INFLIBNET with an aim to facilitate open access to Indian theses and dissertation to the academic community world-wide.

Subsequently, to accomplish this ambitious project, INFLIBNET set-up Shodhganga@INFLIBNET (Shodhganga: a reservoir of Indian Theses) by using DSpace, an open source digital repository software developed by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in partnership between Hewlett-Packard (HP).

Shodhganga@INFLIBNET provides a platform for research students to deposit their Ph.D. theses and make it available to the entire scholarly community in open access. However, it is possible to impose restrictions on access as a special case, if so desired by the university / research scholar. The repository has the ability to capture, index, store, disseminate and preserve ETDs submitted by the researchers. Universities are required to sign an MoU with the INFLIBNET Centre to participate in the Shodhganga project.